About

Open­Shoe is an aca­d­e­mic project for cre­at­ing an open source embed­ded foot-mounted INS imple­men­ta­tion. The project con­tain both hard­ware and soft­ware com­po­nents all of which are doc­u­mented and released under open source licenses. Our moti­va­tion for the project has been to

To pro­vide a research vehi­cle for our research on the foot-mounted sys­tems themselves.

Cre­ate a thor­ough and well-documented embed­ded imple­men­ta­tion for ourself.

Give other researchers a short-cut to a sim­ple work­ing imple­men­ta­tion thereby set­ting a base­line in the field.

To have a solid and well-documented imple­men­ta­tion is a neces­sity for our future research activ­i­ties within indoor posi­tion­ing. The cur­rent use span from being a sub­com­po­nent in larger posi­tion­ing sys­tem to being used as a stand alone com­po­nent for research within the foot-mounted INS field.

The desire to pro­vide a base­line imple­men­ta­tion comes from our obser­va­tions of many poor imple­men­ta­tions and mea­sure­ment setups and our own expe­ri­ence of all small details that can go wrong. The value of an embed­ded imple­men­ta­tion is the mod­u­lar­ity and the small weight, bulk, and price in com­par­i­son with the typ­i­cal sensor-plus-laptop research sys­tems. This alle­vi­ates the work of inte­gra­tion in larger real-time nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems and makes it pos­si­bil­ity to equip a large num­ber of users with sen­sors for field per­for­mance tests and coop­er­a­tive nav­i­ga­tion stud­ies. Our hope is that this imple­men­ta­tion will save time, sweat, and tears for nav­i­ga­tion researchers and facil­i­tate the use of foot-mounted iner­tial nav­i­ga­tion by researchers not spe­cial­ized in iner­tial nav­i­ga­tion, e.g. in fields such as bio­med­ical engi­neer­ing, behav­ioral sci­ence, and ubiq­ui­tous computing.

The first gen­er­a­tion of the foot-mounted INS mod­ules was built dur­ing the fall and win­ter of 2011–2012 by KTH (KTH Royal Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy, Stock­holm, Swe­den) researchers work­ing at IISc (Indian Insti­tutet of Sci­ence, Ban­ga­lore, India). Over the period 2012–2013 we pri­mar­ily worked with sys­tem level aspects of these mod­ules and devel­oped the sta­tis­ti­cal mod­u­lar­iza­tion which lets us use only the “step-updates” while still repro­duc­ing the sta­tis­tics of the com­plete sys­tem on a higher sys­tem level. Dur­ing 2014 the mod­ules were revised and the made smaller, wire­less, cheaper and better.

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Open­Shoe is an open source project for cre­at­ing an embed­ded foot-mounted INS implementation.